Every advance in artificial intelligence raises an uncomfortable question for the legal profession: if all lawyers have access to the same knowledge and the same tools, why will a client continue to choose one lawyer rather than another? The answer will shape the future of the legal profession.
Technical skills will remain essential. Lawyers will not be able to do without a solid knowledge of the law or a command of AI tools. However, that knowledge will tend to become more homogeneous: AI is turning many technical skills into an increasingly less differentiating factor.
Legal knowledge will not be enough to stand out. Competitive advantage will increasingly lie in what no machine can fully replicate: humanity. Technology will tend to level technical skills; soft skills will continue to determine the client’s choice.
In the age of AI, the key to professional success will not lie solely in legal knowledge or in mastering AI, but in those skills that no technology can fully replace.
The market knows them as soft skills. I prefer to call them differential skills, because they explain why one lawyer is chosen over another when both have an excellent technical level.
Soft skills constitute the lawyer’s main differential skills and can be grouped into four major pillars:
Adaptability
Technology evolves faster than people. Adaptability will therefore have to become a permanent attitude: learning, unlearning and learning again, questioning habits, leaving comfort zones behind and maintaining intellectual curiosity throughout one’s professional life. The most successful lawyers will be those who know best how to evolve.
Relational intelligence
Clients will continue to need to feel heard, understood and accompanied in moments of uncertainty. Artificial intelligence can provide information; a good lawyer conveys peace of mind.
Trust remains the real reason why a client entrusts a professional with their assets, their company or their reputation. It does not arise by chance: it is built through credibility, consistency, authenticity and a particular way of relating to people. Social skills, the ability to generate trust, the building of solid relationships and the creation of learning and business networks will therefore become even more relevant.
Active listening and empathy will also take on extraordinary importance. A lawyer’s true value proposition does not begin when they speak; it begins when they listen. Active listening means understanding the client’s explicit and implicit needs and wishes, asking the right questions and offering solutions that respond to their reality. When clients feel that they have been understood, trust appears naturally.
Higher-order thinking
Imagination in finding innovative solutions, creativity, critical thinking and the ability to innovate will become increasingly valuable skills. Lawyers will add less and less value through the information they possess and more through the judgement with which they interpret it.
Personal strength
Resilience, ethical decision-making, mediation, collaborative conflict resolution, the ability to calm anxious clients and leadership will remain profoundly human.
There is, moreover, one skill on which all the previous ones rest: self-knowledge.
It is difficult to understand a client if we do not first understand ourselves. We have automatic patterns that can guide our decisions if we are unaware of them. Those who identify their strengths, limitations, motivations and patterns of behaviour develop greater emotional intelligence, improve their personal and professional relationships and make better decisions. Professional development begins with personal development.
Many lawyers devote enormous effort to perfecting skills that will soon cease to differentiate them, while neglecting those that increase their value as people and as professionals.
AI, by itself, does not generate trust. It does not understand the suffering of a family, the concern of an entrepreneur or the uncertainty of someone facing litigation. It does not inspire. It does not lead. It does not build lasting relationships.
That is why I am convinced that the lawyer of the future will not simply be the one who uses AI best, but the one who manages to become the lawyer most trusted by their clients.
AI will make all lawyers more competent. Differential skills will determine who is chosen by clients, because the real challenge is no longer to compete with AI, or even with other lawyers. It is to become the professional whom clients want to choose.
The future of the legal profession belongs to those who never stop growing as people and as professionals, who better understand human beings, generate more trust and manage to become the lawyer most trusted by their clients.
© Francesc Domínguez, legal marketing consultant. Article published in Expansión, Spanish business newspaper
